Ever seen this tactic when trying to get rid of bad backlinks?

[Patrick_G]

I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.

[AlexMcKee]

They've messed up in general really. They should be blocking robots to what appears to be the CMS for their clients use as there are surely numerous effects on their clients (cannibalization caused by the duplication of pages, for instance). As Mike said they've not taken into account the SEO aspects of the way they've implemented their system.

[Patrick_G]

Thanks Alex,

It I assume could also be the "nofollow" issue Mike mentioned.

[AlexMcKee]

Michael has it right. Online Agency (onlineagency.com) build websites for travel agencies. In the URLs you gave, Patrick, you can see some sort of ID for the site (starmandstravel.com). I guess that this content.onlineagency.com subdomain is the content management system to allow the travel agencies to update their content.

Google may be interpreting lots of similar/related websites on the same infrastructure as an attempt to game its algorithms (they have the same nameservers, although different c blocks but many of the other sites built by that agency also share the same c block [..170.140]).

[MichaelC-15022]

I don't think there is any tactic happening. They simply are building lots of mini websites for their clients and messed up on no following affiliate links. it appears that they have not done any of the basic SEO audit work on their system. Nothing deliberate here IMHO.

[Patrick_G]

Thanks for the input. I've never seen something like this before, nor can I really tell why it would benefit content.onlineagency.com, but I figured perhaps this was a normal black hat tactic I had not heard of.

Perhaps if it is a tactic to get travelexinsurance.com more inbound links, it's somehow designed to copy relevant content from someone else that is already pointed at travelexinsurance.com, and then simply create another backlink, piggybacking on the content.

[Party_Experts]

That is a strange one.

It seems that content.onlineagency are themselves a travel company (http://content.onlineagency.com/c/74/74684/7466411_74684.htm)

It's strange that they have that page that is clearly copied.

I can't see any connection between the 2  companies, apart from their websites are quite similar in terms of quality.

The only thing that I can think is they are actually competitors and somebody is trying some sort of negative SEO tactics.

But this shouldn't really effect your clients site, just disavow and move on is my advice

[Patrick_G]

I must not be explaining it well.

Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com.

One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516

In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/...

So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in all that.

And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com.

So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I fear this might be a part of that.

Hopefully it makes more sense.

[MichaelC-15022]

So if I understand you correctly, your client who's penalized is www.starmandstravel.com, and you're seeing in their GWT backlinks list a ton of links from content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599 and one or both of the other parameters are varying, right?

So then your question is:  where are the onlineagency pages linked from?

[Patrick_G]

My guess is no. I'm fairly new here, but I'm sure my predecessor would not have.

Or are you asking if these websites who link to use are using canonical URLs? My guess in that case is they wouldn't be either.

[CGR-Creative]

Are you using canonical URLs?